By Park Si-soo South Korea's self-governing resort island Jeju has eased its immigration rules to attract more visitors and bolster its tourism industry. And its cost: a surge in undocumented foreign residents. The Ministry of Justice said the number of undocumented foreign residents on Jeju had reached a record-high 10,000. It was nearly a tenfold hike in five years.The data was announced at a meeting of immigration and labor officials from Jeju and Gwangju on Jan. 30. The meeting was organized to share information about the latest immigration trends and discuss related issues. At the meeting, the ministry's Jeju office said 9,846 foreigners were undocumented on Jeju as of the end of 2017, up nearly 10 times from 992 in 2012. Many of them are believed to have entered by taking advantage of a 30-day visa waiver program. Jeju introduced the program in 2002 to attract short-term travelers from China and Southeast Asian countries. But it has been abused by jobseekers there who want to land a job on Jeju or mainland Korea whose average salary is higher than their hometowns. Nearly half work at construction sites on Jeju as manual laborers, the office said. Participants agreed to tighten check of loopholes in immigration rules and monitoring of construction sites and other workplaces that rely on foreign workers.

Meanwhile, the Jeju office said it had caught 1,445 undocumented foreigners at 334 worksites last year. Including them, a total of 3,508 were deported in 2017, it said.